Okay, so I plan on buying this mobo:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6813131013

And now I'm not sure if my Western Digital Caviar 80GB HDD will be compatible with it? All these terms like SATA, Serial ATA, and RAID don't make sense to me as I never really thought about hdd's other than their storage. My WD is an IDE storage device, so would I need some converter adapter or something?

Also, I purchased at office Depot (there was a hefty rebate and I had a gift card) this hard drive: http://www.officedepot.com/ddSKU.d [...] ue&An=text

I haven't opened it yet b/c I'm not sure if I even need to get a new one.

Basically, I wanna know if I should take back the Maxtor and get a different interface that will work with the mobo, or if my current Western Digital is compatible.


Thanks

I think your are asking if the Maxtor hard drive you bought will work with the Asus motherboard you have listed? Yes.

yes I sound a bit frantic I know. But for the money I paid for that MAxtor I think now I might as well go with a WD SATA 3.0Gb/s 250GB.

WD SATA is better than the IDE Maxtor you bought. Much faster and much more capable HD.

I noticed the Asus MB only has one IDE connection for two devices. You will likely need that IDE MB connector for your optical drives, not that Maxtor IDE HD you have. Unless your optical drives (DVD, DVD-R) are SATA interface also.

nope, my optical is E-IDE. You're right though. I am going to return the MAxtor and get an SATA drive off Newegg. Thanks.

Do it. I just bought one of the SATA 1.5GB/s and I love it. You may want to look into that one because it is like 15bucks cheaper and it does the exact same thing speed wise. They are both the same drive physically, only the interface is different, and you can get one with 16mb of cache and you would never see the difference in normal use.

Yeah, you will have to hook your ptical drive to the one IDE controller you have. The WD SATA will work much better once you get it fired up. Fast! Maxtor IDE, slow!

I agree with the WD SATA hard drive, reliable and fast.

Actually, I had a Maxtor DiamondPlus 9 (80 GB - ATA133 - 2 MB cache) HDD, and it was faster than my actual WD SATA300 HDD... I don't know why, but it was faster. Of course, on average reading, because the WD in burst readings totally wipes the floor with the Maxtor...
In case you want to know: Maxtor=58-60 MB/s - WD=50-54 MB/s 8)